Rick Santorum Quotes

17 September 2012

During a speech at the Value Voters Summit on Saturday, Rick Santorum attacked “smart people” and the media:

“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”

Santorum then proceeded to attack members of his own party:

“When it comes to conservatism libertarian types can say, “oh, well you know, we don't want to talk about social issues”. Without the church and the family, there is no conservative movement, there is no basic values of America.”

22 August 2012

Rick Santorum on why Romney might lose during an interview with Howard Kurtz:

“If the campaign is about issues, we win. If it's about Mitt Romney's record as a businessman, then we don't win. If it's about Mitt Romney's tax returns, then we don't win. If it's about whether people like Mitt Romney more than Barack Obama, then we don't win.”

Only one thing to disagree with there, and that’s Santorum’s statement that “if the campaign is about issues” they win. On the contrary, if the American public understood just how far ‘round the proverbial bend the Republican Party has ventured, said Republican Party would never win another national election again.

12 June 2012

“Governor Romney is a tremendous improvement. I think we could have been even more of an improvement, but that’s, you know, that’s, that, that, that, that issue was passed. Uh, Governor Romney is an important and dramatic improvement, and that’s why we’re behind him.”

04 May 2012

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are meeting privately this morning in Pittsburgh:

The campaigns had refused to discuss details of the get together and were trying to keep the location secret. They have planned no press coverage of the meeting.

Santorum aides have said an immediate endorsement of Romney is not expected at the session. Instead, they describe an opportunity for the one-time opponents to get to know each other better and discuss the upcoming general election campaign, as well as some of the conservative policy issues important to the former Pennsylvania senator.

Meanwhile, the DNC put out a video re Romney and Santorum. Watch:

Yeah, Mitt, I’m thinking that you just can’t stuff all that vitriol from your former adversaries during the primary campaign back down under.

23 March 2012

“You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who's just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you're going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future.”

- Rick Santorum speculates that Americans might be better off sticking with President Obama than replacing him with Romney.

Gee, thanks, Rick. But, well, I have to say that this is absolutely the strangest Republican primary season I’ve ever seen.

20 March 2012

“We need a candidate who's going to be a fighter for freedom. Who’s going to get up and make that the central theme in this race because it is the central theme in this race. I don't care what the unemployment rate's going to be. Doesn't matter to me. My campaign doesn't hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates. It's something more foundational that's going on.”

- Rick Santorum in Illinois yesterday, insisting that “freedom” (i.e. politics) is more important than the economy.

19 March 2012

“It really has to do with what your principles and what your core is. I have a core.... And that's a sharp contrast with Mitt Romney, who was for RomneyCare.... this is someone who doesn't have a core. He's been on both sides of almost every single issue in the past ten years.”

18 March 2012

If you’ve been watching the GOP primaries, you know that the right wing cares absolutely nothing for truth, in fact, almost always preferring to lead with lies about President Obama, global warming, gas prices, the Affordable Care Act, the economy, unemployment, and on and on, all catering to the preferences of the 1% who are funding the Republican super PACS.

This past week the CBO came out with a revised estimate of the cost of the Affordable Care Act; it will actually cost less than the CBO had previously estimated, and that isn’t even mentioning the fact that it will reduce our deficit by massive amounts ($210 billion over the 2012-2021 period).

Republicans, including Rick Santorum, came out with .......no, not spin, but outright lies about the CBO’s revised estimate, because of course they can’t win an election if they don’t lie about POTUS’ policies, accomplishments, the improving economy, and so forth. Rick Santorum’s lie was told to a small crowd in Missouri on Friday:

“You know what people are going to be talking about this week and next week? Obamacare. Why? Well, the Congressional Budget Office this week just came out with their new numbers. And I know you’re gonna be shocked to hear this, but it’s twice as expensive as what President Obama said.”

And there was a lot more Republican spin on the CBO report, some of it listed by FactCheck.org:

House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price of Georgia put out a press release saying that “[t]he new CBO projection estimates that the law will cost $1.76 trillion over 10 years – well above the $940 billion Democrats originally claimed.”

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions also issued a release saying: “President Obama told the American people his health law would cost around $900 billion over 10 years, but CBO’s numbers reveal that we will spend more than $1.75 trillion on only the coverage provisions over just 9 years.”

Several of our readers emailed us about a Fox News article that repeated the Republicans’ claims, saying that the CBO had found the law would cost “twice as much as the original $900 billion price tag.”

In a March 13 report, the CBO gave updated estimates for the cost of insurance coverage provisions of the law for the 2012-2021 period. It said the gross cost — not including revenue measures — would be slightly higher than it had estimated a year earlier, in March 2011. The latest estimate puts the cost at $1.496 trillion over that decade, up by about $50 billion, which is a 3.5 percent increase.

The latest estimate of year-by-year costs is also higher than what was originally estimated two years ago, when the bill was enacted. The latest estimate covers only eight of the years (2012 through 2019) that are in the original estimate. The total “gross” costs of that eight-year period are now estimated to be just over $1 trillion, or about 8.6 percent higher than originally projected.

But the CBO also projects that much of the new spending will be offset by penalties paid by employers who choose not to provide coverage to their workers, by penalties paid by individuals who opt not to obtain coverage, by taxing high-cost health plans and by other effects of the law’s coverage provisions. After accounting for these offsets, the “net” cost of the coverage provisions are now expected to be somewhat lower than projected two years ago. Comparing the eight years that are common to both estimates, the net cost is now predicted to be $772 billion, or about half a percent lower than originally estimated.

There is no doubt in my mind that Republicans, including Rick Santorum, will continue to lie about this and anything else that shines a light on what a remarkable job President Obama has done in his first four years, so it’s up to all of us who support this president to make sure that we both know the facts, and that we grab the opportunity to convey those facts whenever necessary.

By the way, I ran across this topless photo of Santorum on Dave Weigel’s blog, and thought you might like a look at the pasty white and unattractive Rick sunbathing in Puerto Rico last week.

UPDATE: The lie has gone viral in wingnutland, and as a result, we now have many more articles from other entities debunking the lies. Like this one from Paul Krugman, this one from the CBO, and another from Media Matters.

17 March 2012

“On so many fronts, there could be no person in this country we could nominate who would be any worse on taking on Barack Obama on the most important issue of the day, ObamaCare, than Gov. Romney. And it's the equivalent of malpractice to nominate someone who gives away the most important issue in this race.”

According to Rick Santorum, the most important issue in this race is eliminating a health care policy [the Affordable Care Act, aka “ObamaCare”] which insures the uninsured, and reduces the deficit, while eliminating roadblocks for those with pre-existing conditions. Far more important than the economy, according to GOP candidates.

14 March 2012

“Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law, and that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii, but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language.”

- Rick Santorum informs Puerto Ricans that if it wishes to be a state, it must make English its principal language, as quoted by Reuters.

Yeah, just forget about speaking the language of your culture, Puerto Ricans, but, good freaking Gods, someone tell Santorum that the U.S. doesn’t have an official language, and there is no such requirement for a territory to become a state.

“We'll have a Wall Street banker going up against the president of the United States -- not the best matchup for us.”

“I don't know of one group of people that's more disliked than politicians -- it may be the folks who gave us the Wall Street bailout. And that's where Mitt Romney comes from.”

“Gov. Romney has a career as an investment banker and someone who's a private equity guy on Wall Street. I'm not too sure that necessarily commends you well to be president of the United States.”“I didn't pass RomneyCare, which is a government takeover of 1/6th of the economy. With Mitt Romney, his solution to a health care problem is to take over 1/6th of the economy. You can't call yourself a conservative. You can call yourself a socialist, but you can't call yourself a conservative.”

- Rick Santorum sharpens his attacks on Mitt Romney, as quoted by MSNBC First Read.

- Rick Santorum explains that the financial crisis in 2008 was caused by high gas prices. Seriously.

Santorum's comments appear to stretch the limits of credulity. The words "gas," "gasoline," and "energy" to not appear in the conclusions of the congressionally-appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, tasked with exploring the root causes of the 2008 recession and financial crisis.

- In Davison, Michigan over the weekend, Rick Santorum opined some more about climate change. This line was apparently repeated several times because he liked it so much.

[....]the line comes up relatively frequently on the right. In 2010, a Republican senator [Kit Bond-Missouri] argued, in all seriousness, "Without carbon, my trees would die."

In 2009, Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) explained during a House committee hearing that it would be wrong to reduce carbon emissions because the pollution is "plant food." Shimkus rhetorically asked his colleagues, "[I]f we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?"

Last year, the House Republican conference made Shimkus the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Environment and Economy. They are not without a sense of humor.

It's probably worth pausing from time to time to consider this on the merits, in case anyone is inclined to take the right's rhetoric seriously.

We're currently pumping about 90 million tons of carbon emissions into the air every day. This creates the conditions that lead to global warming, and the seriousness of the crisis continues to get worse.

The plants Rick Santorum is encouraging us to talk to do not need 90 million tons of carbon to survive. Or put another way, the fact that plants use carbon does not make it okay when we have too much carbon pollution.

The crisis is real, and the need for a grown-up debate is overwhelming. We need policymakers who are up for the task, not policymakers who think "Tell that to the plants" is a clever policy observation.

“One of the favorite things of the left is to use your sentimentality, and your proper understanding and belief that we are stewards of this earth and we have a responsibility to hand off a beautiful earth to the next generation. 'They use that and they have used it in the past to try to scare you into supporting radical ideas on the environment. They tried it with this idea, this politicization of science called man-made global warming... I stood up and fought against those things. Why? Because they will destroy the very foundation of prosperity in our country.”

- Rick Santorum characterizes climate change as a plot of the left, and claims that actually dealing with climate change as though, you know its real, will destroy the “very foundation of prosperity in our country”.

27 February 2012

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation between church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and visions of our country.”

- Yesterday, Rick Santorum told George Stephanopoulos on ‘This Week’ that he doesn’t believe in the absolute separation of church and state, unlike of course, President John F. Kennedy, for one. Think Progress:

John F. Kennedy was just one in a long lineage of U.S. presidents, founding fathers, scholars and religious icons who supported absolute separation between church and state. Even Ronald Reagan, to whom Santorum has compared himself, proudly proclaimed that “we establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate.”

23 February 2012

In an interview with an AP reporter in 2003, Rick Santorum compared consensual and legal gay sex with the illegal acts of bigamy, polygamy, and incest, along with the act of adultery:

“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”

Santorum made this particular comment on February 5, at the Grace Bible Church in Columbia, Missouri. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family (the Christian organization which was the subject of Jeffrey Sharlet’s book “The Family”) and a Santorum supporter (Dobson endorsed Santorum), moderated the forum.

Santorum claimed that in the Netherlands, the elderly are euthanized without their consent:

“In the Netherlands people wear a different bracelet if you're elderly and the bracelet is 'do not euthanize me.' Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year, and it's 10 percent of all deaths for the Netherlands, half of those people are euthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don't go to the hospital, they go to another country, because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, that they will not come out of that hospital if they go in with sickness.”

As you might imagine, his inaccurate and patently false comments regarding a law regulating end of life procedures in the Netherlands, caused quite an uproar in the Netherlands.

First, let's review the law. The 2001 Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act allows Dutch citizens to end their lives if they are suffering from a medical condition that causes "unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement." There are two end-of-life procedures: euthanasia, where a doctor administers a fatal drug, or assisted suicide, where the doctor prescribes the fatal drug and the patient administers it. The law took effect on April 1, 2002.

According to a publication distributed by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, doctors must be satisfied that the patient's request is "voluntary and well-considered," and that there is "unbearable suffering with no prospect for improvement." The patient's doctor must consult at least one other independent doctor, who is responsible for ensuring the "due care criteria" is met.

After the termination of a patient's life, the death must be reported to the government and reviewed by regional committees composed of, at a minimum, a doctor, ethicist and legal expert.

Now, let's look at Santorum's three claims. We'll begin with a stunning claim that the elderly are so afraid of being euthanized for "budget purposes" that they wear "do not euthanize me" bracelets. We were told by a government official and a representative of a Dutch physicians' association that this is simply not true.

When we contacted the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, public health spokeswoman Inge Freriksen told us that "a bracelet asking not to be euthanized doesn't exist." Patients would only be euthanized after they followed the set of guidelines as outlined above.

“Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.”

- Rick Santorum in 2008 talking about how Satan is attacking America. Seriously.

Adding........a padded cell would really make a much more effective cage than the White House.

21 February 2012

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s OK; contraception is OK. It’s not OK. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

- In an interview with a conservative blog in October 2011, Rick Santorum implies that contraception is “evil”.

“We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christan ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is a shambles, it s gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. ”

20 February 2012

Ya know, there is always a lot of mud slinging in politics, but modern Republicans have gone way off the edge with the stuff they’re slinging since the black man took office.

Case in point, here’s the whiny little evangelical nightmare, Rick Santorum, questioning Pres. Obama’s faith as if we’re supposed to believe that Santorum’s repugnant remarks are anything more than yet another dogwhistle, words which might make us think that the black man is simply different from “us” [white folks].

The “president’s agenda” is “not about you,” he said. “It’s not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your job. It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology,” Santorum said to applause from the crowd. “Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology.” [...]

Although Santorum criticizes the president daily on the campaign trail, this is the first time he has used this rhetoric or said the president has a “different theology.”

In a statement, Santorum’s campaign said the candidate was not actually talking about Obama’s religion but rather his belief in secularism, adding, “The President says he’s a Christian and Rick believes that and has even said so publicly many times.”

Santorum appears to be on a mission to be a one-man Council of Trent, the 16th Century Catholic ecumenical council that defined Protestants as heretics. In a 2008 speech rediscovered this week, Santorum said Mainline Protestants — about 45 million Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Methodists and others — are “gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”

As conservative Presbyterian blogger John Schroeder wrote, Santorum’s “truly intolerant comments concerning Obama pretty well disqualify him from holding office. It is simply not the president’s job to be judging whose theology is correct and whose is not.”

John Schroeder is right. Rick Santorum is unqualified to be president. Not just for the reason cited by Schroeder, but for others as well. In fact, Santorum shouldn’t even be wasting our frickin’ time and taxpayer money by running.

18 February 2012

“Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.”

- The GOP’s far right Evangelical dope, Rick Santorum, calls a pregnancy which occurs because of a rape, “a gift in a very broken way”.

15 February 2012

“It’s [contraception] not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, they are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also [inaudible], but also procreative.”

- The GOP’s uber-religious presidential wannabe, Rick Santorum, on who should and should not be able to access contraception, which he views as only for those who are married.

13 February 2012

“[I]nterestingly enough, here is what they are forcing them to do — in an insurance policy, they or [sic] forcing them to pay for something that costs just a few dollars. Is that what insurance is for? The foundational idea that we have the [sic] government tells you that you have to pay for everything as a business. Things that are not really things you need insurance for, and still forcing on something [sic] that is not a critical economic need, when you have an economic distress, where you would need insurance. But forcing them even more to do it for minor expenses.”

- Rick Santorum, buffoonish leader of the GOP, says birth control is cheap. You don’t need no damn insurance to pay for it! And this candidate for the presidency of the United States, says it with numerous grammatical errors in his delivery.

(Maybe you see this as nitpicky, but honestly, I am very disinclined to once again call a man who can’t manage to speak the English language properly, the leader of the most powerful country on Earth. Not to mention the fact that we’re also the largest English-speaking nation on Earth.)

10 February 2012

Santorum warns that Obama will lead us to execution of the religious via decapitation:

Rick Santorum continued to rail against President Obama’s so-called war against religion during a town hall in Plano, Texas Wednesday night. The former Pennsylvania senator — who has spent the last several days criticizing the government’s requirement that insurers provide contraception coverage and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision striking down Proposition 8 — accused the administration of “crushing” religion and setting the United States on the path towards executing religious people by decapitation:

SANTORUM: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you right, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we do and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

And, according to the latest polling, this guy is the new favored leader of the Republicans. Seriously.

06 January 2012

“I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”

- Rick Santorum derides poor black people in Iowa last week, using a racist dog-whistle that has become typical of GOP talking points during this election cycle. Santorum should know that only 9% of public assistance recipients in Iowa are actually black. 39% of public assistance recipients are white.

Santorum should probably switch to an attack on poor white people. Or hey, maybe he could make gay people (another group for which Santorum has no love) out to be the major recipients of government assistance.

“I’ve looked at that quote, in fact I looked at the video. In fact, I’m pretty confident I didn’t say black. I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — mumbled it and sort of changed my thought.”

- Rick Santorum on CBS with John King [after being called out by civil rights groups], denying his racist comment of the day before, ridiculously claiming that he didn’t say ‘black’ people, he said ‘blah’ people.

Ahem.......the ‘Blah’ community is rightfully outraged by Santorum’s inaccurate and racist remarks.

“I’d go to the ramparts on this one,” Santorum said at a Rotary Club breakfast in Manchester, New Hampshire. “I hope that the Senate has the backbone to say, ‘You will withdraw these nominations or we are doing nothing.”

This is a perfectly legal move that was made in order to get around three years of GOP obstruction, for the protection of 99% of the American people, but I think we can infer from his comment that Rick Santorum thinks it’s far more important to continue obstructing the business of the American people.

04 January 2012

Rick Santorum wants to determine what your values should be, and if you’re not heterosexual, he doesn’t care to see America make laws that would be more inclusive of you, and afford you full civil rights as a citizen.

Why? Well, because Santorum thinks that the gay lifestyle doesn’t reflect Judeo-Christian values, and he thinks that the values of all Americans should be reflected in laws which are based only on that religious foundation. Allowing you to marry...well, that would “destabilize the American family”.

In other words, Santorum put forth a crock of complete and utter shit to defend his bias against gay people:

“People should have the right to live the life they want to lead. But that doesn't mean that we have to adopt as matters of public policy, policies that change the basic value structure of our country to accommodate that lifestyle, if you will.

And, so, I've always said, you know, look, I've had people who actually worked for me who were gays, and they did their job like anybody else, and we were able to work together and we did work together. So, it's not a problem.

I'm against discrimination for people who should not be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. If they can, and do their job, they should. But that doesn't mean that we should change the laws of this country......to destabilize the American family, to change the way we look at religious liberty in this country, to accommodate a different value structure.

It's not about them, it's about values. It's about what America's basic moral American values should be that would be reflected in the laws.

And so, I've taken the position that the moral values reflected in the laws should be the moral values that built this country, which is the Judeo-Christian values, and that the laws should try as much as possible to comport with the higher law and also should comport with what reason would dictate. And what reason dictates is that children need mothers and fathers. … Some say well, through technology, same-sex couples can have children. Well they can, through either adoption, or artificial insemination…but they don’t get the mother and a father.”

Watch:

From a December 6, 2011 talk he gave to a crowd in Spencer Iowa, during the Republican primaries - election 2012.

10 October 2011

“We’ve seen with this president, experience matters.When that phone call comes at three o’clock in the morning, I will be up and ready for the call because I will know what’s going on in the world around us.”

13 June 2011

Sunday, on Meet the Press, former senator and GOP presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, described his absolutist position on abortion -- life begins at conception, no exceptions for incest or rape, and doctors performing abortions should be criminally charged.

QUESTION: Do you believe that there should be any legal exceptions for rape or incest when it comes to abortion?

SANTORUM: I believe that life begins at conception, and that that life should be guaranteed under the Constitution. That is a person.

QUESTION: So even in the case of rape or incest, that would be taking a life?

SANTORUM:That would be taking a life, and I believe that any doctor that performs an abortion, I would advocate that any doctor that performs an abortion, should be criminally charged for doing so.

It’s worth noting that Santorum’s statement that “life begins at conception” also indicates that he would make it a crime to provide many forms of birth control to victims of rape or incest. During a debate with Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), who defeated Santorum in 2006, Santorum took the position that the morning after pill is the exact same thing as abortion if it is taken after “the egg has been fertilized.”

Moreover, Santorum’s position that the Constitution compels laws protecting fetuses places him at odds with the Supreme Court’s most conservative members. In DeShanney v. Winnebago County, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution’s guarantee that no person shall be denied “life . . . without due process of law” does not actually require the government to criminalize anything — a decision that runs directly counter to Santorum’s position on abortion. Justice Antonin Scalia, who has gone so far as to say that the Constitution does not prevent gender discrimination, was in the majority in DeShanney.

06 May 2011

GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has been full of really, really dumb things to say lately, but today on Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show, he made a statement that just might take the prize:

9/11 families and everybody else in America should be furious at this president that he’s walking abound taking credit for, you know, getting Osama bin Laden. He didn’t get Osama bin Laden! … The president of the United States simply said — courageous act, give him credit for saying yes — but that’s all he did, is say yes. He didn’t do the hard work. The people he’s going after did the hard work. And that is an outrage.

05 May 2011

In March, GOP presidential hopeful and lunatic, Rick Santorum said we should go to war over “moral” values:

“America is about an idea, and it has to be about shared value, or what is it? What is it? And that's why these moral issues, that everyone says oh, maybe we should step to the side and have a truce on, you can't. It is who we are. It is the purpose of our country. And I have been out fighting the wars on these moral issues.”

Watch:

Rick Santorum is the anti-gay, anti-abortion guy who is running on these social issues. Never mind health reform or jobs. Or anything important or non-discriminatory, for that matter.

04 May 2011

GOP presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum, is all on board with Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to end Medicare. Think Progress interviewed Santorum at the AFP Presidential Summit in Manchester, NH:

SCOTT KEYES:The Ryan budget plan. If you were president, would you sign that?

SANTORUM:Yeah, I support the Ryan budget plan. I think it’s the right direction on the major points. I can’t say I’ve read all of it, but on the major thrust of what he’s doing, I support what he wants to do with Medicare, Medicaid. The only thing I would do, frankly, as I’ve said publicly many times, I think we should implement a lot of these things sooner than what he’s suggesting.

Adding....Rick Santorum has now filed the paperwork to form a presidential exploratory committee.

09 October 2010

Former Senator Rick Santorum [R] defending Newt Gingrich’s intentionally stupid obsession with food stamps on Fox News, with a ridiculous lie about poverty during the George W. Bush administration:

Yeah, remember, under the Bush administration, welfare — I mean, excuse me, poverty among African Americans and among single unmarried women, poverty was at the lowest rate ever in the history of this country. So Obama’s policies are not working, Bush polices worked! For long a time as a matter of fact.